Would upgrading a Radeon HD 5770 Improve 4k render

Will Dearborn wrote on 8/28/2015, 10:48 PM
I have a 4 year old self built computer, with msi p55-gd65 motherboard, i7-860, 16gb ram, non raid 1tb Caviler Black HDD for project media, C drive is a 60gb SSD, Another HDD drive to render to, and a AMD Radeon HD 5770 graphics card, and now a pcie usb3 card.

Right now I'm just doing basic video editing & color correcting on 100/mb 4k footage, sometimes 1080p, and can get some moderately smooth playback with playback set to preview / quarter.

Stabilizing takes I think 2.5x for 1080p, and something like 15x for 4k, Rendering can take a long time sometimes.

I know I'm on the low end of graphics cards, but it would be one of the easiest things to upgrade. Would I see significant improvement with playback, stabilizing, & render times upgrading my GPU, and if so what is a good value card you'd recommend?

Thanks

Comments

Will Dearborn wrote on 8/28/2015, 10:52 PM
I should say, I'm pretty much just rendering to 1080p. Not sure what the best settings are for this yet. And I'm not using proxies.
Steve Grisetti wrote on 8/29/2015, 8:43 AM
You will certainly see some playback performance improvement. But, beyond that, it's difficult to say to what degree or how much other features, like rendering, would be affected.

It's difficult to recommend a specific card -- although I've found this chart very helpful.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

Your current card rates a 1686, which isn't bad.

My GTX 570 is not a state of the art card, but it rates nearly a 4400 and cost me about $125 (as I said, I bought it a couple of years old on Amazon). I've not tried editing any heavy duty 4K video, but it certainly allows me to work with the NewBlue 3D titler and edit pretty high-end HitFilm effects with no problems.

Just don't expect miracles no matter which card you buy. Movie Studio doesn't get a whole lot of spunk from your graphics card.

In fact, I would expect that the next generation of Movie Studio (if and when it happens) would be a better investment. Most likely 4K support will be a priority.

astar wrote on 9/1/2015, 1:47 AM
I commented on your other post.

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/showmessage.asp?messageid=930757

I would try the optimizations listed at the bottom of the post. Then I would look at a HD7970-ghz as an upgrade to the 5770, or R9 270X+ card. The problem with going so high as a 290x+ is that your system will be holding back the 290X. The 7970-ghz will most likely be held back, but at least your CPU and memory will not be. Basically you want the highest OpenCL device you can afford for Vegas. Vegas uses a combo of OpenCL compute units on your CPU, and your GPU, sending data back and forth on the PCIe interface. Maximizing the CPU core count, and Compute Unit count on your GPU, then having the optimal path connecting the two devices is the secret sauce. At some point you just want to get away from the PCIe 2 interface of the 860 and get up to PCIe3.0.

With Vegas specifically, its all about the OpenCL performance. The Benchmarking site listed before is a good ranking site for that benchmark. But a review that includes LuxMark ranking, and vegas ranking is more useful. Luxmark uses opencl in a similar fashion to Vegas, and fully loads the CPU and GPU during tests.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-290x-review/18

You can see that 7970 ranks exceptionally high due to the compute unit count and other stats. 7970 would be an ebay item, an R9 card with similar compute unit count would next up.

Nvidia is just not optimized with Vegas, and the results with OpenCL optimized apps shows.